Consultant/Contractor not settling?

[AhAgain]

Anyone gone into a work placement (as a consultant/contractor) and not settled?

I am on day 6 (3rd week - part time) and not feeling at all happy. This is a 12 week contract - which I will not be renewing (for family reason) - so I need to get into things fast. But I am not.

It’s a the start up of a two year project in a highly regulated business. It is a business area that is new to me and to a level of domain knowledge which is also currently beyond my experience.

My local boss is unstructured, very difficult to get to talk to, very interesting, but hard to get anything useful/concrete out of. His second in commend is positively obstructive: has denied me acres to things and is bordering on rude in addition to unhelpful. So I am not getting much direction.

I am really struggling to get a handle on things (very big very poorly defined remit) and now beginning to wondering about the point of it. Don’t want to spend the rest of the 9/10 weeks floundering though.

Advice? The only thing I can think of at the moment is speaking to my line manager back at my home office.